Wasp and leaf-hopper

This wasp landed on the paver near a large plant pot and sat there buzzing its wings for a moment, as shown here, and then crawled to a drainage hole in its base and walked inside:

Crawling into the base of the pot (how does it keep its wings clean, I wonder?)

A week or two back, I saw a similar wasp carry prey to a hole in the top surface of the dirt. Together with the one entering the bottom of the pot, it had me wondering whether the whole pot was tunnelled and whether the roots of the plant (actually the Desert Rose which the Sunbird was raiding for nesting material) were being eaten by wasp larvae. The answer to the second question should, I realised, be ‘no’: bugs which carry other bugs home as food were not likely to be root-eaters.

Carrying prey towards her nesting site

Here we go again … carrying a leafhopper towards the drainage hole in the bottom of the plant pot. What she didn’t know was that we had re-potted the plant, because it had been looking sickly, since she dug a tunnel there. In the process we saw quite a lot of white Leaf-hoppers in the dirt (maybe a dozen) but no network of tunnels, no colony of wasps and no root-eating grubs.

Finally, here she is trying to re-dig her tunnel while still holding the prey. It didn’t work very well and she flew off again with her load. I saw her fly to a nearby plant and stop for a rest but didn’t see what happened after that.

Now, where's my hole?

One of the experts on the Flickr Field Guide to Australian Insects kindly identified the wasp for me as ‘a Gorytini wasp, perhaps Austrogorytes sp., Crabronidae’. All Crabronidae are solitary wasps which provision nests with paralysed prey as food for their larvae. The biggest of them take cicadas – they must be a lot bigger than my wasp here which is only about 10 mm long and preys (exclusively, going by what we saw in the dirt) on Flatid leaf-hoppers like these.

Insects of Townsville

Many of my older posts link to Graeme Cocks’ excellent “Insects of Townsville.” Late in 2016 it moved to http://kooka.info/orders.html. The new site is still incomplete but is your best hope of finding the information or photo.